(Shanghai Daily)
Updated: 2008-01-14 11:33

Winter vacation is coming next week, yet Shen Yiqian is upset. For her, the month-long winter break means more study, no fun. Her mother has already set up a demanding schedule: English, piano and painting lessons.

Chinese kids are sorely tested. All this extra schooling aims at making the seven-year-old more competitive in a demanding, fast-paced society.

For her winter-break studies Shen will be rewarded with a Japanese cartoon TV drama on DVD and a short trip to scenic Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province.

"I have no choice," says her mother Wu Lihua, an accountant. "People around me have all made detailed and early plans for their children. I just can't let my daughter lose at the starting line."

It's fair enough to want to give your child an edge. Children of today like Shen won't confront basic living problems in their future. But their parents can pay scant attention to their psychological needs for rest, fun and a largely worry-free childhood.

Parents are pushing their children too hard to excel academically at very early ages, says Professor Yang Xiong, director of the Institute of Youth and Juveniles with the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.

"Parents, many of whom are white-collar workers with good educational backgrounds, place excessive expectations on their children," he says.

"Some kids are even deprived of a happy childhood since they are trained and supposed to be 'geniuses.' Yet a wise approach is to let children be children."

He warns that though kids today, overwhelmingly in one-child families, are smarter or more knowledgeable than those in the past, they are also facing new problems such as lack of sleep and free time, anxiety over performance and pleasing their parents and even retrogression in their daily-life abilities and skills.

"It's sad that some primary-school students still don't know how to tie their shoes or take a bath on their own," says Yang. Because of all the attention focused on them, he says, "they are also likely to become selfish and self-centered."

Education these days is overwhelmingly exam-oriented. "Teaching for examination and learning for examination" has been the motto for years, and it's difficult to change the mindset. The system is much criticized for turning out good test-takers but relatively few well-rounded students who are curious, inquiring and who take the initiative. Passive, not active learners.

The concept of "quality-oriented education" or quality education has been around since the 1980s and Chinese educators have tried to gradually put it into practice since the 1990s, encouraging students to think for themselves and be creative.

Turning out well-rounded, physically and emotionally healthy people is a slow process. Parents push their children to score high, and teachers still focus on the tests.

   1 2 3   

   1 2 3